than a solid character; and at the end of two months,' says this shrewd observer, he had stayed long enough here.' Carlyle gives the following sketch of an afternoon spent with the English stranger: I called on him one morning at Dalkeith, when he said I had come most à-propos, if not engaged, for that he was going to ride to Edin. burgh to make some calls: and his wife being engaged to dine with the Duchess of Gordon, he would be very glad of a small party in a tavern. I agreed, and we rode to Edinburgh together. When we drew near that city, he begged me to ride on and bespeak a small dinner at a tavern, and get a friend or two if I could to join us, as he must turn to the left to call on some people who lived in that direction. I went to town directly, and luckily found Home and Ferguson in Kincaid the bookseller]'s shop, and sent a cady to Robertson, to ask him to meet us at the Cross Keys soon after two o'clock, who likewise came. During dinner, and for almost an hour after, Charles, who seemed to be fatigued by his morning visits, spoke not a single word, and we four went on with our kind of conversation without adverting to Mr Townshend's absence. After he had drunk a pint of claret, he seemed to awaken from his reverie, and then silenced us all with a torrent of colloquial eloquence, which was highly entertaining, for he gave us all our own ideas over again, embodied in the finest language, and delivered in the most impressive manner. When he parted from us, my friends remarked upon his excellence in this talent, in which Robertson agreed with them, without, perhaps, being conscious that he was the most able proficient in that art.'+ Charles Townshend fully appears to have been one of those persons with showy and superficial talents who make an impression on all around them, but produce no permanent good results. He could move and delight men, but not improve or guide them. In some peculiar circumstances, and at certain crises, his gift of the tongue might have proved serviceable; but, usually, such powers are only calculated to create or support delusions, by making the worse appear the better reason. Public men possessed of fascinating eloquence should in general be viewed with suspicion, and carefully guarded against, for they are apt to do great mischief. To make a pulpit orator a leader in a church, or raise a clever special pleader to a place in the cabinet council, are dangerous movements. In general, the powers which have made them famous are, at the best, useless in grave and important circumstances; often, the prestige which these powers have given, only enables them to interfere injuriously with the course pointed out by the wise. Perilous it is for a country to have a political system in which brilliant parliamentary oratory is allowed any but a moderate sway. It might be of some service to inquire how often mere oratory has been on the side of what was just, reasonable, and for the good of a state, and how often the reverse; and whether, on the whole, the affairs of A street message-carrier was so called in the northern capital. + Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle, 1860, p. 391. MR PITT AND HIS SERVANT. nations and of individuals would not have been in a better case at this moment, if there never had existed any man capable of standing up and sawing the air, and puffing and sweating, while pouring out an ocean of exaggerated phrases calculated to work on the feelings of a multitude. DEATH OF SIR FRANCIS BURDETT. This event took place on the 23rd of January 1844, when Sir Thomas had attained his seventyfourth year. The strain of political sentiment which made him the idol of the populace in the reign of George III., had long given place to strong conservatism, and he necessarily became a man of little political note in his latter years. When we remember the Gracchus-like position of Sir Francis in April 1810-ordered to the Tower for a libel on the House of Commons, and standing a siege of horse and foot in his house in Piccadilly for several days before the warrant could be executed-the story of his death reads strangely. It was the fortune of this fine old English gentleman to be united to a daughter of Mr Coutts the banker; and the pair had lived together with singular attachment and harmony for upwards of fifty years. Towards the close of 1843, Lady Burdett's state of health excited great alarm in her family. She died on the 10th of January 1844. Her death sounded her husband's knell. She who had so long been the partner and sharer of his joys and troubles, the mother of his children, the friend of his soul, being now removed, from that instant life became an insupportable burthen to him. Resolutely refusing food or nourishment of any kind, he died on the 23rd of the same month; and man and wife were buried side by side in the same vaults, at the same hour, on the same day, in the church of Ramsbury, Wilts. MR PITT AND HIS SERVANT. Obviously a good end would be served if examples good results, were occasionally presented for the conof a reasonable treatment of servants, followed by sideration of masters and mistresses. Mr Pitt, who was so able a servant of the state, was also a good master to his own domestics: that is, he did not fail to recognise good conduct in his servants, and to treat them with due consideration of their numerous duties. He was likewise very quick in the perception of qualities which recommend an individual for domestic service, of which the following is an interesting in stance: Mr Pitt once obtained a servant in a very odd way. Riding on the moors with a friend, they came up with a flock of geese, driven by a boy, with a bit of red rag at the end of a long stick. We must ride round,' said Mr Pitt, we shall never get through this immense flock." "Yes, but you may,' cried a sharplooking boy, who had heard him, if you will only keep your horses quiet. Sh-sh-ee-ayi-ayi!' and the boy waved his stick here and there, and in a minute or two the flock opened, and, wheeling to the left and right in regular columns, made a passage through which they rode. lad,' observed Mr Pitt; 'he manoeuvres his little army better;' and he ordered the groom to inquire to whom in a wonderful manner-a general could not do it he belonged. A day or two afterwards, he was sent for, and put in the stables. Next he was made an under-groom; then taken to town to wait on the "That must be a clever upper servants, and afterwards made a footman. One day, Mr Pitt went down to Holwood, in Kent, with Mr Dundas and three or four friends, to talk over parliamentary business: some time before the dinnerhour, the cook was seized with apoplexy, which so affected the butler and occasional valet that he fell with a fit of gout. Mr Pitt grew anxious about the dinner, when the young man whom he had advanced from gooseherd to footman, said, 'Don't, sir, send off any express for a cook; if you think proper, the maid shall cook the dinner. These are your intimate friends, and will take no notice: their servants as yet know nothing of the matter, for I thought they might be frightened to be where there is a dead man. Let me manage, and all will go well, without any alarm being spread. He accordingly dressed Mr Pitt, saw to everything, and acquitted himself so well, that Mr Pitt soon after made him his valet; but he did not live much longer, to have his services recompensed. He was an excellent servant. Mr Pitt would sometimes order him to precede him a day or two to a place he was about to visit. 'You will excuse me, sir,' the man would reply: but I mustn't go; for if I do, who will attend you when you take your physic to-morrow? You will be busy, and put it off; and nobody knows how to give it but myself.' 'Well, well,' Mr Pitt would answer, 'do so, then; and would add, Ah! he is very anxious about me-I must let him have his own way.' 97. JANUARY 24. St Timothy, disciple of St Paul, martyr at Ephesus, St Babylas, bishop of Antioch, about 250. St Macedonius of Syria, 5th century. St Cadocus or Cadoc, abbot of Wales, 6th century. St Suranus, abbot in Umbria, martyr, 7th century. Born.-Charles Earl of Dorset, poet, 1637; Frederick the Great, 1712; Pierre A. Caron de Beaumarchais, musical composer, Paris, 1732. Died.-Justice Henry Yelverton, 1650; James Ralph, political writer, 1762. CHARLES EARL OF DORSET. A wit among lords, a generous friend to literary men, himself a fair writer of verses, gay but not reckless, honest far above his time, so much a favourite that, do what he liked, the world never thought him in the wrong,-Dorset claims some respect even in a later and better age. His poems are merely a bunch of trifles; yet there is some heart, and also some feeling of the deeper realities of life, under the rosy badinage of his well-known ballad, To all you ladies now at land, professedly indited at sea the night before an engagement with the Dutch fleet, but stated to have been in reality the work of about a week:* 'When any mournful tune you hear, As if it sighed with each man's care, Think how often love we've made To you, when all those tunes were played. 'In justice you can not refuse To think of our distress, Our certain happiness; Life by A. Chalmers, Brit. Poets, viii. 339 FREDERICK THE GREAT. YOUTH OF FREDERICK THE GREAT. Frederick II., King of Prussia, son of Frederick William I. and of Sophia Dorothea, Princess of Hanover, and surnamed the Great for his talents and successes, was, in his boyhood, treated with extreme severity, through the antagonism of his parents. His youthful tuition was rigid, its sole object being military exercises; but he received the rudiments of his education from a French lady. The taste he acquired through her means for polite literature, was strongly opposed to the system of his coarse father, who would say, 'My eldest son is a coxcomb, proud, and has a fine French spirit, that spoils all my plans.' The conduct of the old savage towards him was both harsh and cruel; it was still more so to any one to whom he was attached, or who was in any way, agreeable to the prince. A young girl, who had played on the pianoforte while the prince accompanied her on the flute, was publicly flogged by the executioner in the streets of Potsdam. The queen could not endure this injustice towards her son, and arranged that he should seek refuge in England with his maternal uncle George II. This secret plan, which was confided only to the prince's sister, and two lieutenants, his friends, was discovered by the King, who, finding that his son had already quitted the palace, sent soldiers in search of him, and he was discovered just as he was getting into a chariot to carry him to Saxony. One of the lieutenants, his companions, escaped by the fleetness of his horse; but the other was carried back to Potsdam with the prince; both being handcuffed like malefactors, and thrown into separate dungeons; and the princess, who implored the king to pardon her brother, was thrown from one of the palace windows. The King had made up his mind that his son should die on the scaffold: He will always be a disobedient subject,' said he, and I have three life was only saved by the intercession of the other boys who are more than his equals.' His Emperor of Austria, Charles VI., through his ambassador, Count Seckendorf. Nor could the King bring his son to trial; for neither the ministers nor generals would sit in judgment upon the heir to the crown of Prussia, which so enraged the King that he sent the prince to be confined for life in a fortress at Custrin. Previously to his being conveyed to prison, the lieutenant who had been taken with him, was, by the King's order, executed upon a lofty scaffold, opposite the windows of the apartment in which the prince was confined. At Custrin, he saw no one but the governor of the fortress; books, pens, paper, and his flute, were all denied him. When he had been imprisoned a year, the resentment of his father abated; he was ordered to Berlin; and there, at a grand fête at the palace, Frederick, in a grey suit, the only one he had been permitted to wear since his disgrace, was placed behind the chair of his mother. He then grew in favour with his father, who, however, could not forgive his disinclination for military exercises, and his love of music and the fine arts; but above all his preference of foreign fashions to the plain, inelegant Prussian uniform, which the King so liked. Yet this prince, having ascended the throne, established the military renown of Prussia, and became one of the most famous generals in history; leaving to his successor a kingdom enlarged from 2190 to 3515 German square miles, and an army of 200,000 men. Notwithstanding his fame as a monarch, legislator, and man of letters, Frederick, according to his own account, spent the happiest years of his life, when he was a youth, in the chateau of Rheinsberg, not far from Berlin. WEATHERCOCKS. JANUARY 25. ST PAUL'S DAY. St Juventinus and Maximinus, martyrs at Antioch, 363. St Apollo, abbot in Thebais, about 393. St Publius, abbot in Syria, 4th century. St Projectus (or St Prix), bishop of Clermont, martyr, 674. St Poppo, abbot of Stavello, 1048. St Paul's Day. It The festival of the Conversion of St Paul, instituted by the church in gratitude for so miraculous and so important an instance of the The invention of the vane, or weathercock, must Divine power, a perfect model of a true conhave been of very early date. Vitruvius calls it triton, version, is mentioned in several calendars and probably from its having in his time the form of a triton. missals of the eighth and ninth centuries. The usual form on towers, castles, and secular build- was for some time kept a holiday of obligation in ings, was that of a banner; but on ecelesiastical edi- most churches of the West; and we read it fices, it generally was a representation of the male of mentioned as such in England in the council of the barn-door fowl. According to Ducange, the Oxford, in 1222, in the reign of King Henry III.' cock was originally devised as an emblem of clerical-Butler. It is still a festival of the Anglican, vigilance, or what it ought to be. Apart from symbolism, the large tail of the cock was well adapted to turn with the wind. Many churches have for a vane the emblem of the saints to whom they are dedicated: thus, St Peter's, Cornhill, London, is surmounted with a key, St Peter being said to keep the key of heaven. St Laurence has for a vane, a gridiron; and St Laurence, at Norwich, has the gridiron, with the holy martyr extended upon the bars. The vane upon St Mildred's Church, in the Poultry, is a gilt ship in full sail; and that of St Michael's, Queenhithe, a ship, the hull of which will hold a bushel of grain, referring to the former traffic in corn at the hithe. St Sepulchre's Church, Skinner-street, has four pinnacles, each with a vane, which led Howell to say: Unreasonable people are as hard to reconcile as the vanes of St Sepulchre's tower, which never looked all four upon one point of the heavens.' The grasshopper of the Royal Exchange is the vane which surmounted the former Exchange. It is of copper-gilt, eleven feet long, and represents the crest of Sir Thomas Gresham, the founder of the first Exchange. But the old civic tradition that this was adopted as an heraldic symbol, from a grasshopper having saved his life when he was a poor famished boy, by attracting a person to the spot where he lay in a helpless condition,-is not supported by fact; since the letters of Sir Thomas Gresham's father, which are in the Paston collection, bear a seal with the grasshopper. This was likewise the sign of Gresham, placed over the door of his banking-house and goldsmith's shop, in Lombard-street: this grasshopper, which was of large size and gilt, existed entire until the year 1795, when the house, now No. 68, was rebuilt. The dragon upon the spire of Bow Church, in Cheapside, is another celebrated vane: it is of copper gilt, eleven feet in length, and when it was re-gilt in 1820, a young Irishman descended from the spire-point on the back of the dragon, pushing it from the cornices and scaffolds with his feet, in the presence of thousands of spectators. One of Mother Shipton's prophecies was, that when the dragon of Bow Church and the grasshopper of the Royal Exchange should meet, London streets would be deluged with blood! In 1820, both these vanes were lying together in the yard of a stonemason in Old-street-road, but, happily, the prophecy was not fulfilled. The vane at Fotheringay Church, Northamptonshire, represents the falcon and fetterlock, the badge of the Dukes of York. as well as other churches. The day has also a celebrity of another description, the origin of which has not yet been dis covered. It has been an article of constant belief in Western Europe, during the middle ages, and even down to our own time, that the whole character of the coming year is prognosticated by the condition of the weather on this day; and this is the more singular, as the day itself was one of those to which the old prognosticators gave the character of a dies Egyptiacus, or unlucky day. The special knowledge of the from it, were arranged under four heads, in four future, which it was believed might be derived monkish Latin verses, which are found very frequently in the manuscripts of the middle ages, and prevailed equally on the continent and in our own island. The following is the most correct copy of these verses that we have been able to obtain (in copies of a later date, attempts were made to improve the style of the Latin, which in some degree destroyed their quaintness) : 'Clara dies Pauli bona tempora denotat anni; Si nix vel pluvia, designat tempora cara; Si fiant nebulæ, pereunt animalia quæque ; Si fiant venti, designat prælia genti.' Fair weather on St Paul's day thus betided a prosperous year; snow or rain betokened a dear year, and therefore an unfruitful one; clouds foreboded great mortality among cattle; and winds were to be the forerunners of war. Several old translations of these lines into verse in French and English are met with; the following is one of the English versions: 'If St Paul's day be fair and clear, Then war shall vexe the kingdome oft.' Other days in the month of January enjoyed at different times, and in different places, a similar reputation among the old prognosticators, but none of them were anything like so generally held and believed in as the day of the Conversion of St Paul. In the reign of Philip and Mary (1555), this day was observed in the metropolis with great processional state. In the Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London, we read that 'on St Paul's day there was a general procession with the children of all the schools in London, with all the clerks, curates, and parsons, and vicars, in copes, with their crosses; also the choir of St Paul's; and divers bishops in their habits, and the Bishop of London, with his pontificals and cope, bearing the sacrament under a canopy, and four prebends bearing it in their gray amos; and so up into Leadenhall, with the mayor and aldermen in scarlet, with their cloaks, and all the crafts in their best array; and so came down again on the other side, and so to St Paul's again. And then the king, with my lord cardinal, came to St Paul's, and heard masse, and went home again; and at night great bonfires were made through all London, for the joy of the people that were converted likewise as St Paul was converted.' Down to about this time there was observed, in connection with St Paul's Cathedral, a custom arising from an obligation incurred by Sir William Baud in 1375, when he was permitted to enclose twenty acres of the Dean's land, in consideration of presenting the clergy of the cathedral with a fat buck and doe yearly on the days of the Conversion and Commemoration of St Paul. On these days, the buck and the doe were brought by one or more servants at the hour of the procession, and through the midst thereof, and offered at the high altar of St Paul's Cathedral: after which the persons that brought the buck received of the Dean and Chapter, by the hands of their Chamberlain, twelve pence sterling for their entertainment; but nothing when they brought the doe. The buck being brought to the steps of the altar, the Dean and Chapter, apparelled in copes and proper vestments, with garlands of roses on their heads, sent the body of the buck to be baked, and had the head and horns fixed on a pole before the cross, in their procession round about the church, till they issued at the west door, where the keeper that brought it blowed the death of the buck, and then the horns that were about the city answered him in like manner; for which they had each, of the Dean and Chapter, three and fourpence in money, and their dinner; and the keeper, during his stay, meat, drink, and lodging, and five shillings in money at his going away; together with a loaf of bread, having in it the picture of St Paul.'* Born.-Robert Boyle, 1627, Lismore; Thomas Tanner, antiquary, 1674; Paul Whitehead, 1709; Robert Burns, 1759; Sir Francis Burdett, 1770; James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd), poet, 1772; Benjamin Robert Haydon, painter, 1786, Plymouth; Daniel Maclise, artist, 1811, Cork. Died.-William Shield, dramatic composer, 1829. ROBERT BURNS. Robert Burns, the Scottish poet, first saw the light on the 25th January 1759 in a small cottage by the wayside near the Bridge of Doon, two * Beauties of England, v. 486. ROBERT BURNS. miles from Ayr. A wonderful destiny was that of the peasant's babe born that day-a life of toil, imprudence, poverty, closed in early death, but to be followed by an afflatus of popular admiration and sympathy such as never before nor since attended a literary name in any country. The strains of Burns touch all hearts. He has put words together, as scarcely any writer ever did before him. His name has become a stenograph for a whole system of national feelings and predilections. Other poets, after death, have a tablet in Westminster Abbey, and occasional BY THOMAS MILLER. Upon a stormy winter night Proclaimed, that Nature had on hand They came obedient to her call:- Flew gladly to that humble home: And then he bowed down to the ground:- Said Wit, 'He shall have mirth and laughter, Said Labour, 'I will give him bread.' And I a stone when he is dead,' Said Wealth, while Shame hung down her head. 'He'll need no monument,' said Fame; 'I'll give him an immortal name; When obelisks in ruin fall, Proud shall it stand above them all; The daisy on the mountain side Shall ever spread it far and wide; Even the road-side thistle down Said Time, That name, while I remain, Time ceased: no sound the silence stirr'd, Which murmuring Doon seemed to prolong, Had gone and 'left a thorn' behind. Upon the sleeping infant's face Of Love, whose locks were white as snow. The immortal infant heaved a sigh, As if he knew such love must die. That ceased: then shrieks and sounds of laughter, That seemed to shake both roof and rafter, Floated from where Kirk Alloway Half buried in the darkness lay. A mingled look of fun and fear Stern looked the infant in repose. The clang of warriors died away, Pity's soft tears fell on the floor, While Hope spake low, and Love looked pale, Groans seemed to rend the infant's breast, |